


Feels Nice, Means Nothing

by PoppyAlexander



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three, Headcanon, M/M, Oh Yes Even More Angst, Pre-Series, Sad, Smoking, This Sherstrade Headcanon Will Break Yr Heart, Was Sad Before!, You Thought, it's possible, sad wanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-15 15:57:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3453182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoppyAlexander/pseuds/PoppyAlexander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When their affair ended, Sherlock deleted it. Even his name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feels Nice, Means Nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HHarris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HHarris/gifts).



> Gifting this to Holly, but it is really her story. I just made it into paragraphs. "Story by Poppy, based on an idea by Holly." Like that.
> 
> *
> 
> Note that Sherlock thinks of/refers to himself as a "boy" but he is a young man, early- to mid-20s.

"...So. That's it then."

Greg sighs hard, sweeps his hand back through his hair, making it stand up around his forehead a bit. "I'm sorry. I'm sure you knew it couldn't last. And that's my fault. I never should have let it begin."

Of course Sherlock had known it was going to amount to nothing. The sum total of their physical relationship: Greg the happy recipient of countless blow jobs while Sherlock was left to please himself, and just one drunken, fumbling occasion when Greg had half-heartedly taken Sherlock in hand. Though there had been an enormous amount of greedy, open-mouthed snogging Sherlock had quite enjoyed, and perhaps it was that which had allowed Sherlock to keep some small hope alive that this all might be something real. In reality, though, it was probably only that Sherlock had needed Greg--needed _someone_ \--so desperately that he'd dedicated himself to the pursuit of a relationship, manipulating this straight, married man into letting Sherlock get on his knees and open his trousers in the first place.

"I've come clean to my wife--well, partly--"

Naturally he'd admitted the affair, but not that it was with a junkie he'd arrested for prostitution. Or that it was with a boy.

"--and we're going to try to work things out." He looks pained. Sherlock longs to kiss him. If he'd known the last time would be _the last time_ , he'd have paid closer attention. He distracts himself by going into Greg's breast pocket for his packet of cigarettes, lights two, sets one between Greg's lips, careful not to let his fingertips touch Greg's lips. Around the cigarette, through mostly-closed lips and gritted teeth: "You deserve better'n me, anyway, Poppet..."

"Don't call me that." Sherlock feels something needy and agonizing flaring up in his gut, in his throat, and it makes him hate himself. "You don't get to call me that."

"Right. You're right." He stands up from the edge of the bed, Sherlock's only piece of furniture. The sheets smell of sex and stale cigarette smoke and Greg's cheap after shave. He's leaving. Sherlock will never survive this.

Greg puts his hand on the side of Sherlock's face, and says, "You'll be all right," and Sherlock lets him, just for a second, closing his eyes and leaning into it, before shaking him off.

"Go, then. Best wishes for a successful reconciliation."

Sherlock turns away, shuffles a pile of stroke mags and chemistry journals as if he has other things to do and doesn't need to be bothered with Greg and his break-up speech and his tedious, inconvenient emotions.

Greg doesn't move, only inhales hard as if he has a lot to say, but then mutters, "Yeh. All right." And he does leave. The lock catching in the doorjamb is as loud as a gun shot.

Sherlock puts his face in his pillow and cries until his gut aches from sobbing and the skin around his eyes is a riot of purple pinpricks: hundreds of burst capillaries beneath the surface. When he has finished weeping, he has a wank remembering Greg's hand in his hair, winding and pulling; his own aching jaw; the growl of, " _Ahh, Poppet_..." that meant he'd done well, that Greg would keep returning to his seedy flat, secretly, never text me at this number, you'll be the ruin of me you impossible brat, c'mere and give us a kiss. When he has finished wanking, he wipes the spunk from his belly with a corner of the bed sheet.

Then he begins deleting it.

He keeps: G. Lestrade. Smart, for an idiot. Will make Detective Inspector within eighteen months. Married. Straight. Supports Doncaster Rovers.

 _Poppet_ he puts in a box with things once fraught with meaning and therefore pressed to his heart and wound round with barbed wire, but whose original associations have been dispensed with. A dog's collar. The smell of amber oil. The corner of a lace tablecloth. And _Poppet_. Things that feel nice, mean nothing.

*

Years later, he will see the word in some other context, on some day ripe with sentiment and a suffocating sense that things might have been different, _if only_ , and it will stop him short. An almost-memory. An almost-voice in his head. An eyeblink, two, and it's gone. Feels nice, then stings.

Means nothing.

 

-END-


End file.
